Reflections on archaeology and inequality. A foreword

In this World Archaeology issue – An Archaeology of Inequality – archaeologists continue the discipline’s engagement with social inequality in a wide range of contexts and times. My work has always been about power, oppression and how to change these things. Robert Paynter and I wrote an earlier volume – The Archaeology of Inequality – that addressed these goals (McGuire and Paynter 1991). When Bob and I published the book thirty years ago, Anglophone archaeology was locked in a debate between a culture history of traditions and a processual archaeology focused on cultural evolution. Culture history primarily asked how traditional societies reproduced themselves with little or no attention to the power relations that might entail. The cultural evolutionists saw power as something that ‘egalitarian’ societies lacked except for distinctions of age and gender. They told (and some still tell) a story of how the powerful drove cultural evolution and created inequality (e.g. Flannery and Marcus 2012). We challenged these perspectives and took a relational view of humans and cultural that emphasized the conscious actions of people in their mundane lives as the place people make change. Bob and I participated in a general movement in anthropology, at the end of the 20th century, which emphasized power and the expression of power in domination and resistance. We were greatly influenced by James Scott’s (1985) book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Like many others, we only later discovered Elizabeth Janeway’s (1980) book Power of the Weak. Then as now, focusing on inequality brought us to not just study the world but rather to try and change it.

Before the 1980s, most anthropologists assumed a Weberian (Weber 1978, 53) concept of power to whit; the ability of individuals or groups to get their way when opposed by others. In this sense, power is a quantifiable thing that people can acquire, store, win, lose and expend. In contrast, and following the lead of many others, we advanced a relational concept of power. Our thought started with the work of Karl Marx and the relational dialectic as discussed by Bertell Ollman (2003). We treated power not as a thing or a quantity, but rather as a relationship between humans’ power to do and to have power over. This led to a focus in the book on resistance to inequality as opposed to inequality simply being something imposed from above.

Soon after the publication of our book, critics within Anthropology questioned the concept of resistance (Ortner 1995; Seymour 2006). They noted the vagueness of the concept and the catch all nature of it. They pointed out that researchers rarely defined resistance. The basic consensus among anthropologists had been that resistance involves intent in opposing those exerting ‘power over’. So, if the peasants stole rice because they were hungry, but not with an intent to resist, was rice stealing resistance? Critics accused scholars of romanticizing and fetishizing resistance and essentializing subjects. Such acts led researchers to ignore conflicts and hierarchy within subordinate groups. Critics who wanted to study other relations thought that resistance placed too much emphasis on power. The most telling critique was the charge that a lack of resistance could be used to blame the oppressed for their oppression.

The weight of this critique led me to pursue my research on power and oppression through praxis (McGuire 2008). Praxis refers to the distinctively human ability to knowingly and creatively, make and change both the world and us. The simplest definition of praxis is theoretically informed action. Praxis implies a process of gaining knowledge of the world, critiquing the world, and acting in the world. Knowledge without critique or action are data for data’s sake. Critique without knowledge and action is nihilism. Action without knowledge and critique leads to error and sometimes tyranny.

In response, I am glad to see the papers of this volume continuing to build on our efforts from the early 1990s and the energy of editors and authors in pursuing archaeology as a way of exploring and documenting narratives of inequity in past and present and highlighting more equitable societal models relevant to the challenges of the modern world. What was emergent in the 1990s has not simply become normalized but continues as a vibrant sector of scholarship and action in the 21st century. However, those of us who challenge inequality face a new critique, in ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that turns the focus away from humans to ‘things’ and in doing so diminishes the importance of inequality and power as lenses for understanding human experience in past and present (e.g. McGuire 2021; Olsen 2003; Van Dyke 2021). Advancing the goals of An Archaeology of Inequality gives us starting point to confront this new materialism.

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Randall H. McGuire

Randall H. McGuire is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. He received his BA from the University of Texas and his MA and PhD from the University of Arizona. He has published extensively on Marxist theory and Indigenous archaeology. From 1996 to 2007, he and Dean Saitta of the University of Denver directed the Archaeology of the Colorado Coal Field War, 1913-1914, project near Trinidad, Colorado. He has worked with Elisa Villalpando of the Centro INAH, Sonora for 38 years investigating the Trincheras Tradition of northern Sonora, México. More recently he has done contemporary archaeology studying the materiality of the U.S. – México border.